Free Social Sharing Button Plugins for Boosting Your Traffic.

Social media has reinvented the marketing landscape, and the way we promote ourselves, and our content to billions of active web users. Facebook and Twitter are the two leading social media networks for those who are eager to consume new and trending content on daily basis, and ensuring that our readers are able to connect with us through these networks is a crucial aspects of online success, whether for personal or business reasons. Social media allows us to connect with like-minded groups of people, and consume content that resonates with our own personalities, interests, and aspirations in our life.

We are no longer using social media just to connect with others as well, as predicted by Observer — the social media landscape is changing into a full web powerhouse that we will be able to use for concluding online shopping, for doing more intimate customer service tasks (which are already in full swing in so many ways), and tools like Live interaction between you and your followers. Social media strategies are also constantly changing, so it’s imperative that we don’t just work on our social media posts, but also on our external content on mediums like blogs, and business websites. The changes to expect in coming years are of variety of natures.

Above all else, social media is the number one way of building a following without making any monetary investment, and for us to ensure that our readers are able to help us promote our work, we should make sure that we are providing our readers with the options to promote our work without the need to think twice about it. The best way to do that is through specifically built social media sharing widgets and tools that allow our content to be put on spotlight, without the need to seem pushy or demanding. The best websites in the world rely on such widgets to reach a new audience with the help of existing one, and today we will cover the best social media sharing widgets that take only few minutes to setup, but provide extensive variations of modern web features for maximum exposure and growth hacking.

Sometimes too much choice is just as difficult as too little choice. And in this post, I want to help you choose the best plugin for your needs by sharing the best free social sharing plugins for your WordPress site.

At the end, I’ll recommend some specific plugins that will work best for your unique situation – so I’m definitely not going to leave you out to dry!

Let’s dive in so that you can start getting more social shares in no time!

The best free social media sharing plugins for WordPress websites.

Social Warfare

AddToAny

AddThis

Monarch

Easy Social Share Buttons

MashShare

WP Social Sharing

Social Pug

Custom Share Buttons with Floating Sidebar

Swifty Bar

Kiwi Social Share

Sassy Social Share

Social Warfare

Social Warfare is a popular plugin that comes in both a free and a premium version. While the free version works for lightweight social share buttons, most of the powerful features are, unsurprisingly, in the pro version.

These features are what really help make Social Warfare unique, so they’re what I’ll focus on for the most part.

But before I do that, let me assure you that Social Warfare can indeed handle the basics of WordPress share buttons, including things like:

Social share buttons that just plain look good

Support for all the big social networks (more in the pro version)

Multiple placement options, including floating share buttons

Share counts

That’s all helpful…but here are the features that really stand out:

Pinterest-specific images. Unlike most social networks, taller images usually do better on Pinterest. To take advantage of that, Social Warfare lets you add a special image that only shows up when your article gets shared on Pinterest.

Minimum social proof. Share counts are good because they add social proof…but only if you actually have shares! To avoid the awkward situation where a post only has a few shares (that’s called negative social proof), you can specify a minimum share count that must be met before Social Warfare starts displaying numbers.

Customization. You can easily customize the Tweet that gets shared, add information like Open Graph data, and just generally control exactly how your content will look when visitors share it.

Share count recovery. If you move your site to HTTPS or change domain names, you normally lose all your content’s old share counts…but Social Warfare can help you recover them.

Analytics and link shortening. Social Warfare can automatically create links using your Bitly account, as well as set up Google Analytics UTM and Event Tracking so that you know how effective your social share buttons are.

Price: Limited free plugin. Pro version starts at $29 for one site.

AddToAny

AddToAny is known as the “universal sharing platform” because it lets visitors share to a huge variety of networks just by clicking a single universal + icon. And it also includes dedicated icons for your most popular social networks.

Combined, this gives you access to over 100 sharing options in a compact interface. You can display these icons before or after your content, as well as in both vertical and horizontal bars (or manually via shortcodes, widgets, or template tags).

Everything is also lightweight and asynchronous to ensure quick page load times.

Finally – AddToAny is active on over 500,000 sites, which makes it the most popular social share button plugin at WordPress.org.

Price: Free

AddThis

AddThis is another famous social sharing platform that provides a multitude of options when it comes to marketing your own content using a simple standalone widget. AddThis provides the traditional sharing buttons that can be customized to appear anywhere on the page, there’s a new feature for displaying Social Follow buttons; also anywhere you like. The two other big features are more sophisticated and focus more on the content aspects of the online world. The first one is targeted popups based on your own specifications; now you can easily display tailored content to readers who visit particular pages or sections of the site. And the other one is content recommendation where you can display a widget at the bottom of the page, recommending your readers other interesting and relevant content pages on your site — everything happens through the efforts of AddThis, meaning that all scripts and widgets are fully secure, and also accurate thanks to the latest web technology.

The platform has grown from a tiny company to a full-on enterprise solution for websites small and large. If you are looking to learn more about your audience and its habits, especially in the world of social media, then there are no better platforms out there than AddThis — which offers a complex data analysis platform to teach you everything there is to know about the audience that you are serving.

Monarch

Monarch is a flexible social share plugin from Elegant Themes. If you’re not familiar with that name, Elegant Themes is the maker of the popular Divi theme, as well as a number of other plugins and themes. Elegant Themes sells all of its products through a single membership.

That means, upfront, this plugin will be a little more expensive. But I’ll share why it still might be worth it at the end.

Monarch helps you display social share buttons from over 35 different networks in 5 different locations:

Above/below post content

Floating sidebar

Automatic popup

Automatic fly-in

On images/videos

For the popups and fly-ins, you can choose how to trigger your social share buttons. My favorite trigger is the option to display social share buttons after a user leaves a comment.

This is a great way to boost your share buttons’ conversion rates because you’re asking after the visitor already showed interest by leaving a comment.

You can also customize the style of your buttons, as well as add social share counts.

Finally, Monarch can also help you add social follow buttons using either a shortcode or widget.

Like I said – to access Monarch, you’ll need to purchase the Elegant Themes membership. There’s a ton of value in that membership beyond social share buttons, though. Learn more here.

Price: $89 for access to all Elegant Themes products, including Monarch.

Easy Social Share Buttons

Easy Social Share Buttons offers one of the lengthiest feature lists that I’ve ever seen. Depending on your specific needs, that could be a good or a bad thing. But no one can say you don’t have options with this plugin!

And the fact that Easy Social Share Buttons has maintained a 4.66-star rating (out of 5) on over 24,000 sales suggests that plenty of people like its depth of functionality.

Live chat – you can display a live chat button for Facebook Messenger or Skype Live Chat.

That’s a long list and I still didn’t even touch on every feature! So if your interest is piqued, click below to keep learning…

Price: $20

MashShare

MashShare helps you add a specific type of social share buttons to your WordPress site. True to its name, that type is the style used at Mashable.

So if you’re a fan of Mashable-style social sharing buttons, that’s already a pretty good reason to choose this plugin.

Beyond that, it can also help you display both the actual share count, as well as “virtual shares” to increase social proof (the ethics of this latter strategy is a bit hazy. Personally, I find it dishonest).

MashShare also uses smart caching for those share counts to ensure that it doesn’t slow down your site.

While the free version should be plenty fine if you just want basic Mashable-style buttons for the most popular social networks, you can also buy various premium add-ons for things like:

More social networks

More social share button placement options

Click to tweet and/or select and share

Google Analytics Event Tracking

And there’s also a neat add-on that lets you ask people to like a page after they share one of your posts. Because they’re already interested in your content, asking for a like immediately after is a great way to boost your chances.

Price: Free core plugin. Add-ons are ~$19 each, or you can buy a discounted bundle.

WP Social Sharing

WP Social Sharing is a lot more lightweight than many of the previous plugins. But if all you want to do is add social share buttons for the biggest social networks, this plugin makes it about as simple as possible.

You do get a good amount of targeting options to control exactly which pages/post types your share buttons appear on. And, despite the focus on floating sidebars in the plugin’s name, you can also add regular social share buttons before or after your post content.

There’s one thing to be aware of, though. Unless you upgrade to the Pro version, your floating sidebar will not be responsive. So if you use the free version, make sure that you check the box to Disable Sidebar For Mobile.

Price: Free, or Pro version starts at $40 for a lifetime license

Swifty Bar

Swifty Bar isn’t as popular as many of the other social share button plugins on this list. But it includes a unique approach that definitely makes it worthy of this list.

That approach might not work for every single site – but it’s a cool twist on the normal before/after content or floating sidebar.

So how does it work?

Swifty Bar is a sticky bottom bar that displays social share buttons, as well as author information, estimated reading time, and a next/previous button.

Its focus isn’t just on social sharing buttons – but also on making your content more user-friendly and keeping visitors engaged.

All in all, it’s a pretty cool implementation that I haven’t seen any other plugins do.

Kiwi Social Share

Kiwi Social Share is a lightweight social share button plugin that comes with my personal favorite style – the modern-looking “shift” style (pictured above), as well as three other styles.

In the free version, it helps you create both before/after content and floating share buttons. And it also gives you some targeting options to control which post types your share buttons show up on.

It supports all the major social networks, though not the smaller ones. And it also offers:

4 different button shape styles

Custom colors

2 different button group styles

Share counts

If you need more power, there’s an affordable pro version that adds a Google Analytics integration, link shortening via Bitly, and a few other extra features.

Price: Free, or pro version starts at $19

Sassy Social Share

Sassy Social Share is mostly interesting to me because of its unique button styles and customization options. I can’t promise that you’ll love those styles, but I can promise that they look different than the other plugins on this list.

It also supports a good list of networks, with over 100 sharing/bookmarking services.

You can add both before/after content and floating share bars. And you can also target your share buttons to specific post types or individual pieces of content.

Everything is responsive, and you can also enable/disable both vertical or horizontal floating buttons on mobile devices.

Sassy Social Share supports share counts, including customizable caching to make sure you get accurate share counts without any performance drag.

Finally, you can also purchase add-ons for things like myCRED integration, analytics, share count recovery, and more.

All in all, if you want more control over how your buttons actually look, this is a good option.

Wrapping Up.

If you’re already an Elegant Themes member (or interested in the other Elegant Themes products), Monarch is another good option that can get you access to some of those more “bottom-line-moving” features.

No matter which plugin you choose, I highly recommend playing around with the placement of your buttons and the ordering of your social networks to find the combination that gets you as many shares as possible.